So I know that some contributors and book giveaway winners are still waiting for their copy of _Making Home_ and I offer you profuse apologies. When I was out of town and a friend really wanted to sell copies at an event, Eric gave her some books. Actually, all the books. He didn't realize there weren't more. In the meantime, she didn't sell all of them but for reasons involving complicated personal things hasn't been able to get them back to me. They will re-arrive this weekend, and go out in the mail early next week. Again, apologies for keeping you waiting.
As a form of contrition…

I get a lot of books for review, and for the most part, they are wonderful surprises. Because I receive and read so many books, I rarely sit around saying "Hey, where's my review copy of...X?" Generally I've got a giant pile of books that I need to get to anyway, so I'm much more likely to say "Oh, I didn't realize X was out." So let us first note that I was so anxious for my review copy of Sandor Katz's _The Art of Fermentation_ that I actually sent emails to beg for a copy - only to find that UPS had stuffed this book and another in a really weird place and it had been waiting for me…

Speaking as someone with kids who pretty much are Alligators All Around and Wild Things most of the time, I'm going to miss him. Thanks, Maurice, for the books that fed my childhood and now the childhood of all the kids I love!

I've always read cookbooks the way one reads novels, not only for recipes but for plots, stories and bits of detail, and one of the details I always look for are acknowledgements of particular tastes in my cookbook authors. The reason I look for this is that cookbooks are usually a uniquely authoritative genre - one that purports to tell you THIS IS GOOD. And yet, of course, one's tastes are particular - most cookbooks that don't originate in restaurants are fundamentally about a particular person's sense of what tastes good and is appealing. Some acknowledge this, most don't, but it is…

Lots of stuff to update you all on. First, the family expansion project - still nothing new. After three months of waiting, we've decided to expand our looking in a few different ways - our county just doesn't have a placement, and after all the work of getting ready, we're anxious to get one.
Meanwhile, I'm powering through the Adapting-In-Place Manual, and it will be out next spring. Here's a preview of the Cover:
Making Home Cover.pdf
I'm also getting ready for the ASPO-USA conference - where I'm going to be sharing a hotel room with Nicole Foss. We're going to have a late night…

Just to keep you all updated, we learned yesterday that the children's social worker has decided to separate the children, and place them in three homes. Two will stay with the current foster mother, one with one home, and they are seeking a home for one child and the newborn. Since we will take larger groups than two and there are very few homes that take three or four, we are not candidates to take any of the kids.
I admit, I'm relieved not to have to make a decision about taking these kids - it isn't the numbers, so much as the ages - I realized about myself that while I would happily…

Summer is just about here, and you need some summer reading. Light. Fuzzy. Delightful. Amusing. Perfect for the deck chair or the sand. Nevermind the fact that you are a low-energy, transitioning, cheap, homseteading type, and your deck chair is probably planted on your porch, and the sand is the local playground sandpit - hey, it is summer, you've got to kick back with a book. But what book? The contemporary equivalent of _The Devil Wears Prada_ isn't exactly the stuff of anti-consumerist legend. He may not be that into you, but since really you are both into your garden, who gives…

Some of you may know that a publisher contacted me last year about turning a piece of short fiction I'd written from an adult perspective into a young adult novel. There are several reasons I wanted to do this - the first is that in many ways, the young adult fiction market is much more vital than the adult fiction market - a lot of adults read YA fiction, while the reverse is rarely true. There's the potential to reach a large audience this way. The other, more important reason to me is simply that teenagers and young adults have to know about our future, and they need a vision of a…

I wrote Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage because when it came time for me to take the next steps in eating locally and homegrown - to holding some of summer's bounty for the long winter, there wasn't any book that really covered what all I needed to know. After writing A Nation of Farmers about the "Why" of growing your own and eating locally, I ran into hundreds of people who had the same problem. They wanted to keep eating the same great food after the CSA boxes stopped coming or the farmer's market closed down, but they didn't know how.
One of the…

Hi Folks - It has been a week since I hit the wall and took off from the computer, and I'm back, at least sort of. The combination of a lingering illness, exhaustion from trying to finish the book, stress from a book not doing what I wanted to and just way too much time in front of the computer hit me all at once, and I really needed to step away for a while.
My wonderful editor at New Society (and the kind marketing director who I also dumped my stress on) have been really nice about my melt-down, and we're talking now about a new deadline and release date for the book. I'm very grateful…

First of all, I present to you, the cover for my new book (not yet finished, but it will be really soon) forthcoming this fall. I didn't think it was possible that they could come up with something prettier than the cover for Independence Days (which you can see on the sidebar), but I think they did.
I admit, I'm pretty impressed by it! Plus it fulfills the maxim that all my covers must have food on them, whether the books are about food or not.
Second of all, if you want to see someone's impression of me headlocking a fellow science blogger in a free-for-all, I'm in panel three of this…

Well, there's sledding, and snowmen, and drinking cocoa. There are board games and lessons (we already homeschool the younger three) and sitting around snuggling. There's room cleaning and barn chores and shoveling. There's music to practice and baking to do and new skills to learn.
And there are books. We're in a particularly good period of reading chapter books - Asher at four is ready and interested in sustained narratives, which means that all four kids are old enough for lengthy read alouds. And everyone has a chapter book - or often two, one with Mom and one with Dad - going at any…

My happy-happy-joy-joy of the day. Apparently Independence Days needs a second print run, only 3 months after its release! Yay!
So just in case you are wondering why the heck you'd want to store food, and wanted to start from the beginning, well, there will be no shortage of copies.

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